When the proprietor of Caperton’s store first introduced himself to Tee, a decade and a half back, in 2001, Tee had to repeat back what he’d heard. “Debussy?”
Yessir, just like my Daddy, said Billy Caperton.
That had been a wild moment for Tee, freshly and suddenly sprung from the limbo of his stalled life and grief at the University and into this strange, other world that late summer of 2001, beached almost without thought or warning at the lip of an immense expanse of land and house he’d suddenly inherited and which he could only bring himself to colonize minutely, pulling his small Volkswagen Golf, the hatchback holding a few boxes, up to the back entrance of what had once been a kind of English basement kitchen and servants quarters in one of the house’s wings, and unloading.
Finally, after a few weeks of living frugally off what he’d brought with him, he ventured forth to buy beer, canned beans, bread, cheese, wending his way back along the way he’d first come, through pine and oak-flushed narrow roads, over creeks scalloped with black falls, past pastures, springs, with Paul Jacobs wrenching Debussy’s floaty Estampes out of the CD speakers installed in the dashboard, that famished, familiar bodiless flood of ivory, soundboard, and wound strings that touched a yearning in Tee beyond any body (except, he had to admit, the body of Em), evoking ceiling-lifted curtains, all shadow-print and gravel and hedge-fume of a summer being lived out somewhere else, perpetually.
Every couple of weeks, since that first meeting, Tee had continued to buy his groceries from Caperton, whom he persisted in calling Debussy despite the initial misunderstanding. William “Billy” Caperton had known Tee’s family and had been kind, in her long decline, to his increasingly befuddled great-aunt, delivering groceries in his gun-racked pickup out to her among the feral dogs and suspect tenants, and who was a source to Tee, over the ensuing decade, of what had happened to her during those last years at the house. And he had good-naturedly subjected himself on Tee’s first visit to the store to an impromptu, intensely urged visit out to the passenger seat of Tee’s vehicle to listen to a recording of his namesake on the Golf’s CD player.
Why, Tee wondered later, had he been so insistent with Debussy that late morning? Had it been his accumulated solitude and fresh heartbreak that had made him so uncharacteristically pushy, so inappropriate? W.C., a large man, left the Golf door ajar, one laced hunting boot in the gravel as he half-reclined, fidgeting politely on the split leather seat as Tee played for him a dreamy track of Jardins sous la pluie, then rather gracefully, for such a big person, extricating himself when a customer finally, thank goodness, arrived with an excuse to release him.
Tee made his bi-weekly foray out for beer and groceries despite the fact that Debussy had over time confided to him that he was working on a cure for cancer and kept his tissue samples and other experimental materials stored in three rusted, padlocked freezer chests out under the detached carport behind the store. Mrs. Caperton, who worked the night shift at the regional medical center, and whom Tee had never seen, was somehow implicated, perhaps as supplier or assistant or adjudicator, in these procedures. Capertons was also where Tee picked up what little mail he received, mostly bank and tax statements, utility bills, and various fund and proxy materials from his inheritance that he couldn’t fathom and largely ignored. He wrote checks for cash at Capertons when he needed it. “You know,” W.C. would say to him in later years, “almost nobody uses checks nowadays. Cash neither. Don’t you have a credit card? App on your phone? You could use our ATM.” Debussy nodded to a machine beside the door.
Tee tried to time his trips to Capertons, about an hour’s drive from home, so as to avoid the late-afternoon clutch of hunters, occasional hikers, and other construction workers and public utility types, men mostly but not all younger than himself, who were always polite enough, a nod of the tractor or camo cap when he pulled up in the faded red Golf, but mildly suspicious, too, even after all this time, of the loner with the short reddish-gray ponytail and thick rectangular eyeglasses. Tee was also careful not to cross paths, if he could help it, with Nura, who was rarely around at midday since most babies, she had once informed him, decided to be born between the hours of 7 AM and 7 PM.
Tee had once spent a strange evening with Nura after some persistent invitations on her part, one winter early on, maybe his first winter at the house. Had she been attracted to him? Did she simply want to help him—his insomnia, his solitude, his dislocation, his depression? Perhaps it was her nature, as a midwife, to sniff out the half-way born, the miscarried, and interfere. Despite her decent whiskey and good moussaka, her Ornette Coleman and Grateful Dead L.P.s, and all her kind attempts to get Tee to breathe from his diaphragm, to sit correctly, to lie down and let her walk on his spine, the evening had ended badly, with a slightly tipsy Tee going out for a log for the woodstove and simply getting in his car and driving off.
What was it he’d felt afterwards, safely returned down moonless hairpin, tunneling roads to his dim English basement, surrounded by clocks in half-pieces, benches laid with blades, mallets, cog-wheels, drivers, the immense house above him like an uncharted city, imponderable whole of the synecdoche he represented as the heart slamming in his ribcage finally slowed? A sense of his own absurdity, certainly. Of his penis, quiet in his lap. Of Nura, perhaps waking from sour mash doze to discover his cowardly exit.
Truly, what he felt was exquisite relief, as though he’d run a marathon of jeering happy lovers, and lived. He fried three eggs and ate them in the dark with cracked pepper and Tabasco. Keying open a warm bottle of Guinness from the countertop, he stood, lit by the glacial, neon glow of the refrigerator whose contents he surveyed, and took a long, thirsty swallow. Calmed at last, he settled down to his stool, his waiting tools. “To be awake is to be alive,” Thoreau had said. Well, solitude is 100-proof, Tee replied, as though in conversation with the fawn-like first light of day touching the grimed windows. It magnifies. Intoxicates. A brutal sublime.
Nura abided in her kindness to Tee afterwards, was the better person, even touching his arm now and then when they ran into one another at the store, pushing little hand-sewn mesh packets of Valerian and other roots and herbs into his hands, remedies for the sleeplessness and the melancholy she made Tee himself aware of, an aura he wore like the stench of a gutted deer or a mothballed suit jacket. But his shame in the wake of his behavior with her only made him even more restrained and awkward in her presence afterwards than he already was by nature, and he always slipped away when he encountered her, as soon as he could.
A dusty bell tied with string to the door-springs jangled when Tee entered. It was always dirty in Capertons, and the late morning October light fell in nostalgic, cinnamon-moted stripes along the low counter, the cash register. It took Tee a moment to adjust to the dim room. Nura was at the counter, as it turned out (had she come on foot across the orchard, Tee wondered? He hadn’t seen her van in the lot), describing to Debussy with much gesticulation the breech birth she’d attended for the past 32 hours at an A-frame up in Lacy Hollow. Her maroon yoga pants and felted wool Birkenstocks looked wet and splotchy—certainly that couldn’t be blood and other birth effluvia, Tee thought, surely she changed clothes afterwards? Or wore protective booties? More likely it was moisture from the drenched pastures. Sometimes his own fastidiousness appalled him.
A pea-sized pearl of spittle wobbled at the corner of her mouth as, between sips of Debussy’s bad burnt coffee, Nura replayed the mother’s discomfort, her agony, the fainting partner, the tricky gymnastics and maneuverings of breech and crowning at dawn. “Interesting,” said Debussy, shooting Tee a companionable glance and beginning to stoke a cardboard box with the things he knew Tee had come for. Tee nodded and ducked into one of the store’s two aisles to peruse the canned vegetables, noticing as he did so a large, sweating plastic bucket on the floor at Nura’s feet, partly pushed behind the counter. He sometimes wondered if Nura, too, were somehow complicit in Debussy’s scientific activities.
Debussy in quick order had Tee’s two boxes of olive oil, potatoes, canned tomatoes, oatmeal, wedge of cheddar cheese, loaves of bread, two cartons of eggs, bundle of greens, and a case of stout waiting for him, topped with two thick Sunday newspapers that he’d collected for him over the weeks, and a small stack of mail bundled with a rubber band. Tee paid up, shouldered the boxes, and was outside juggling with the Volkswagen’s hatch when he sensed Nura beside him. “Here you go,” she said, tucking something into the front pocket of his plaid shirt. “Something for the colder weather, home grown.” She lightly squeezed his arm. And then she turned, heading off for the fields behind Capertons, and the sprawling apple orchard that lay between the store and her own small house. Without the white bucket, Tee noticed, also noting her rope of pewter braid, a pendulum swinging along her back, and her soft rear-end moving with suppleness beneath those yoga pants. Middle age. If Nura could be, then so must he be, too, he who went for days without speaking out loud, like someone already very much older than he actually was.
Tee was halfway home when he remembered Nura and patted his pocket. Three big, fragrant joints wrapped in homemade papers. Tee snorted. It had been years. He had to pull off the road a bit—there wasn’t much of a shoulder anywhere—to dig for matches in the glove box. By the time he’d turned into the stone pillars of his long driveway, shawled by Virginia creeper, crimson now, and grapevine, he was as high as a hawk. Was he at last watching his own ridiculous shadow from a great height, the little boxy hatchback veering off now toward The Hole under cover of the alley of kudzu-flocked oaks and boxwoods? Neil Young had replaced Bach on the box—was Tee the last person on earth with a CD player in his car? Someone at Capertons had said they were about to stop doing that, everything was moving to Bluetooth and streaming, whatever that meant—wailing about a dead blind man on the side of the road, eyes eternally opened to the sky.